Conservative columnist begs GOP to 'shed its Trumpian skin' and stop losing women

Conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has written a new column in which she argues that "the Republican Party has become inhospitable to a large majority" of female voters and candidates.

Rubin breaks down the numbers to show how this is a shift. In the midterms, Democrats won women by 19 points, and college-educated white women by 20 points. She points out that "compassionate conservative" George W. Bush won white women with 55 percent of the vote and that Mitt Romney did even better.

"Those elections, however, came before the GOP’s slide into right-wing populism, before it became the Praetorian Guard for a president who bragged about sexual assault," she writes.

She also thinks the GOP will continue to lose female officeholders all the while not "think[ing] anything is terribly wrong."

Trumpian policies like family separation at the border, building relationships with "thuggish leaders" abroad and undermining the Affordable Care Act are all unpopular with women, she says. So is a tone in which "they bellow and they insult" as well as "bully and they condescend."

The conservative columnist expects that the damage will be lasting.

"The longer it takes for Republicans to shed its Trumpian skin, the harder it will be to lure women back into the party," Rubin writes.

Read the full column here.